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San Francisco’s Psychedelic Sixties: A Photographic Trip by Kelly Hart

The San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s… Kelly Hart was there, roaming all over with his camera in hand.

Experience a photographic journey back to the 1960’s in the San Francisco Bay Area with images taken by Kelly Hart as he explores the streets, theaters, dances, protests, light shows, and the culture of those dramatic and influential times.

Kelly Hart turned seventeen in 1960 and still had two years of high school to go, but he had already been bitten by the photo bug and had his own darkroom set up in a closet at home. Soon after graduating high school he moved to Berkeley, California, and was thrilled to witness this multi-racial and diverse reality, and became an avid visual documentarian.

Kelly worked as a free-lance photographer, taking production stills for the UC Drama Department and publicity photos for the Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Some of these shots eventually appeared on album covers. Later, Kelly studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. He also had a part-time job at the Berkeley Art Center hanging the art exhibits and creating show announcements.

He began to experiment with the dimension of time as it can be expressed in still photography through the use of long exposures that allow some motion of the subjects to be recorded as a blur. He went to public events where lighting might produce dramatic effects during such time exposures. He took a whole series of color slides of a theatrical happening that involved nude dancers with colored imagery projected on their bodies and eventually, in March 1966, Playboy Magazine published an article accompanied by four pages of his color photography.

This book begins with black-and-white street scenes before changing to color images in the methods just described. Truly it’s a trip back in time! Available both as a large 8.5×11 paperback and in Kindle format.

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